Taking a look at forms of money throughout history
By 500 BC. many different things had been used as money. The simplest definition of money is what is used to trade value.
Originally what we did was to trade our services to each other. If you were a fisherman you might trade your fishes for some mike to give your children. This is what we call barter trading one service for another.
That system didn’t always work well, you wouldn’t want to trade a cow for a couple of fishes. So another method was needed that would work better within societies. Especially when societies became much larger in size.
In the past there have actually been many different forms of things that were used as money in the past.
The England at one time used sticks as money, they were called Tally sticks.
Banking
As soon as we invented money there have been those that can produce more than others and thus earn more money. This created a need to have some place to save that money for some future use. The history of banking go way back in time even to Egypt and Ancient Greece.
In Ancient Rome they used metal coins. Before Rome used coins, Lidia 1200 BC. to 546 BC. they used gold crude coins.
It didn’t take long before people realized that this was a much better and preferable way to conduct transactions. And did you know that those same coins still have a lot of value today!
Sure they have intrinsic value because the’re old, but that’s not all they have value because they were made out of gold. This satisfies many of the qualities that good money needs to have.
Remember that good money needs to have these qualities: Portable, Durable, Divisible, Fungible, A store of value over time.
So we can see that these coins from Lidia satisfy these properties.
I hope that by now you are already starting to get the picture.
We all know just how important money is in all of our lives. But what we have not been taught in our schools is that we are not currently using money. We are using an Impostor, the ghost of money. We currently are using what is called currency, and its not money.
Remember I just taught you that money has to be a store of value over time’ currency loses value over time. So we shouldn’t be calling it money.
